"So. You are telling me my son and my disciple were swallowed by a spatial explosion."
The voice came through the transmission screen cold and slightly distorted.
Cerejeira kept her eyes on the floor. Sweat tracked down her back.
Cornelius Correl and the Pandora Box vanished too, she thought grimly. But apparently not important enough to mention first.
"We are doing our absolute best to calculate where they might have been teleported to," she managed. "I promise—"
"Your best is irrelevant." Inteja cut across her without raising her voice. "If my son was too weak to handle this, he has paid the price. However." A pause. "I am not weak."
Cerejeira said nothing.
"Find him. Find him and that idiot disciple of mine. I am going there myself."
The screen went black.
Cerejeira stood there for a moment, then let out a long breath she had been holding since the call began. Commander Inteja V. Pharsa was someone even the Great Families avoided provoking under ordinary circumstances. These were not ordinary circumstances. Her son was missing and the blame had landed squarely on Ansep.
The full weight of it sat in her chest. A coordinated Yai-beast invasion. Zelaine Roseblood, Atiya Pharsa, Cornelius Correl, several delegates, all gone. And the Pandora Box with them.
She pressed two fingers to her temple.
"Secretary."
Cerejeira flinched. One of the security officers approached, holding a plastic evidence bag.
"We found a quill and a smartphone at the epicenter of the explosion."
Cerejeira took the items. The quill was unmistakably Atiya's, expensive and pretentious. The phone belonged to Zelaine.
She pressed the power button. The screen lit up locked. She didn't know the password, naturally, but a notification banner sat across the lock screen.
New Message from: Pervy Bitch.
Cerejeira leaned in.
[I didn't appear here. When will I have my own proper debut?]
It was Zelaine's sister.
Cerejeira stared at it. A vein appeared on her forehead. She placed the phone down on the metal table. Gently. Very gently.
"Miss Cerejeira?" the security officer asked. "What are you doing?"
She drew her sidearm and fired three rounds into the device.
BANG. BANG. BANG.
Plastic and glass exploded across the table. The officer jumped back.
Cerejeira holstered her weapon, smoke drifting from the barrel.
"Ungrateful bitches," she said. "Always complaining about screentime."
'You are just angry you probably won't get much either,' a voice whispered somewhere in the back of her mind.
She ignored it.
****
A long silence stretched, broken only by the dull pulse of dizziness gnawing at Atiya's mind. Reluctantly, he pried his eyes open.
"Okay… where am I now?"
His vision was fuzzy and blurred, ghostly shapes flickering, afterimages sliding past each other like bad double-exposure film.
He rubbed his eyes hard, blinked several times, and looked again.
*Yep. Feels exactly like a hangover.*
Gradually the scene sharpened.
Atiya focused enough to take in where he was.
He lifted his left hand first, instinctive and fearful.
It was still there. Intact. Fingers flexing, no pain, no missing wrist.
'Um. If this is a dream, maybe I should just go back to sleep.'
He rolled onto his side, too tired to deal with another mess. The surface beneath him was cold and hard, smooth metal or stone, he couldn't tell.
He curled up, eyes already drifting shut again.
But minutes ticked by like hours.
Sleep didn't come. The world kept insisting.
Then his stomach growled, loud and completely without shame.
'I'm hungry.'
At that instant, something more important slammed into his mind.
'Zelaine… is she here?'
He sat up fast—too fast. The room (or whatever this place was) spun once, then settled.
"Babe? Hey, babe—are you here?"
No answer came.
Only silence. Thick, oppressive silence.
"Okay… guess not."
Atiya rubbed his face with both hands, letting out a long, defeated breath.
'Why the fuck is life playing games with me?
He tried to check the surroundings, but was left completely stunned when his gaze landed on the situation.
He finally forced himself upright, ready to face whatever fresh hell awaited. And hell it might well be. All around him, in every direction, stood hundreds. No. Thousands of people.
Old, young, men and women, children clinging to tatters, adults with haunted eyes, some bound by shackles of chains, some in rags, all pressed together as far as the eye could see.
All hemmed in as they were bound to towering pillars, stretching impossibly high as far as he could see in the darkness.
'I am practically useless here.'
Even still he didn't want to acknowledge the gravity of the situation, for he often failed to distinguish nightmares from reality thanks to his past memories.
'Anyway, I should assess the situation first.'
His gaze shifted again to those numerous people in shackles.
'Not good, I guess.'
'Am I dead? Is this some goddamn punishment in hell? No—no, don't even think it. If I swear, maybe they'll up my sentence.'
He barked a bitter laugh inside his head.
'Like hell it would. Like there's even a hell or heaven at all. And if there was, what's the worst I've done? Murder? But that was before I even knew what it was. God above, cut me some slack.'
Atiya shook his head, trying to get a grip.
'Guess I'll wake up next in a woman's arms… glamorous, voluptuous, eyes bright as stars… Nah, who am I kidding? First I'm stuck in this pit.'
He scanned upwards. The enclosure soared in a perfect arc, tall walls bending overhead like the ribs of some massive, hollow concrete cylinder.
Grimness shrouded the place eerily. It was like a prison designed so that no one could escape by climbing out. The thought soured him even more.
'Trapped, all of us. Was it because I touched the scythe? Is this some sort of ritual for calling upon demons? Dammit, dammit, dammit.'
Dim light seeped in, just enough to piece together the misery around him. Men and women who looked just as lost, some of them so long past fighting that the absence of it had settled into their faces permanently.
There was no spark in their eyes. Just waiting, hanging by the thread of their demise.
It gnawed at Atiya, and he looked back at their eyes that carried sadness he refused to succumb to.
'No. I can't end up like them.'
He clenched his fists, pale at the moment, resolve tightening in his chest.
He was going to survive this.
'There is a way that might work. I have to bet on it. Great, this feels like a moment before the MC gets a power-up.'
Atiya summoned his yai circuits again. The concentric magenta glyphs rotated with the familiar symbols, glowing faintly in the dimness.
To code and complete his skill—that was something he could do to get out of the predicament. So he began.
Time dragged. Nothing happened. Just the shuffle of bare feet and faint, hopeless breathing.
His eyes lingered on one section of the symbols.
'Should I try it… no. I would be courting death myself.'
So he shifted his focus to other parts instead.
Atiya lost track of how long he'd been trapped in this prison.
'How long has it been?'
He wondered.
'What a mess. There's not a single clue to chase.'
He considered the state of his own body—even if he was starved and thirst was taking over slowly, it had not reached an unbearable extent.
'If I'd been here for days, starvation would have chewed me from the inside by now.'
'Less than a day, then… probably.'
But then a new thought twisted through his mind.
'Who says I haven't been fed? Have I just forgotten, or…'
Atiya turned, weaving around the ones who circled him in the darkness. They watched him, he could feel the weight of their gazes, even when they didn't move.
Making no considerable progress, he unsummoned his yai circuits.
He approached a child bound in shackles, his voice soft as he knelt.
"Hey. How long have you been here?"
The only answer was silence.
"How old are you?"
Still no answer.
"Are you a fucking NPC in a horror game?"
Atiya was trying really hard to maintain his composure and after a few minutes, he sighed and left the quiet kid with no life in his eyes alone.
"Fucking loners."
He tried others, wandering through the throng, asking every variation of questions he could conjure to every variation of people.
"Where are we, sir?"
"Is anyone fucking sane here?"
"Which do you prefer, short or tall, young lady?"
"I want Gudao to end up with Mash Kyrielight."
"I love Emilia."
"Who is that bastard that said that I have a small dick!"
Atiya even randomly kicked people out of his frustrations.
None replied.
'What are they, possessed or something.'
'Hey, what am I, Mei Misaki from another anime for all of you to ignore me? Am I Kuroko or what.'
After many tries he gave up.
Fine. I won't ask anymore. Better to do something productive. Yeah. I'll hone my art of staring.
He sat and stared at everyone. He could code, but his Yai was depleted enough from the earlier attempt that pushing it felt reckless.
The space was large enough that the silence had room to settle over everything.
He became just another silent prisoner.
Hours passed.
Then from somewhere deeper in the pit, a sound. Faint at first. The edge of a scream.
Then it came smore and sharper, slicing through the hush one after another.
'What's going on now. Finally something different. Woohoo.'
He forced his way through the mass, pushing past listless bodies.
He broke through to the source and stopped dead.
'Are they killing each other.'
No.
There, lying battered and spent on the cold ground, was the corpse of a mutated bird. Monstrously large, shaped like a crow, multiple tendrils sprouting from its body in every direction.
"Yeah, it really is a dream," he muttered.
But the horror wasn't the beast.
Hundreds of prisoners swarmed over the body, clawing and biting, tearing raw hunks of flesh with a hunger that had nothing human left in it. Gaunt hands grappling, faces smeared dark.
'It's exactly like dogs fighting over scraps.'
Atiya froze. He was used to unnatural sights, to a degree. But this was something else.
"That's not edible, you know," he said, the words falling into the dark for no sane person to hear.
A thin blue smoke curled from the mangled carcass and snaked upward into the air.
He stared at it, unable to decide what was more haunting. The frenzy of his fellow captives, or the question of what, if anything, was left of humanity in this place.
"I suggest you go somewhere safe."
A sudden feminine voice jolted him. He spun around and stared.
"Soon enough Yai beasts will surround this place."
Violet hair. The same proud face he had known for years.
"Shilial, shit, you're here!"
His expression brightened instantly. The woman was having none of it.
"You can call me whatever you like. Though I am not the one you are referring to."
Atiya was about to question her when—
Screech.
A thunderous cry rang from above and every human in the pit went still at once, heads tilting back, eyes finding the silhoutte approaching them fom above.
And in the next second, something massive came crashing down.
As soon as it hit the ground and wasted no time, instantly started to slaughter everyone in sight.
"What the fuck is that."